CII National Conclave

March 05, 2010. Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) organized its national conclave on “IT for inclusive growth, at Hotel ITC Sonar, Kolkata. The event started with the inaugural session, outlining the importance of inclusive growth in a diverse economy like India; in this important era of globalization coupled with major technological changes. Mr. Tamal Dasgupta, Chairman Eastern Region, CII ICTE sub committee and Managing Director, WEBEL, mentioned the initiatives of CII member organizations in promoting inclusive growth as a point of focus among corporate India. Dr. Ganesh Natarajan, Chairman, CII National Committee on IT/ ITeS /E-commerce, and Vice Chairman & CEO, Zensar delivered the theme address of the conclave citing examples of how smart ICT interventions have led to social inclusion and how West Bengal has led the way for the rest of the nation. Dr. Debesh Das, Minister of IT, West Bengal, Mr. Siddharth, Principal Secretary-IT, West Bengal and Mr. Ashis Sanyal, Sr. Director-IT, Ministry of Communications and IT, Government of India; reiterated the various flagship programmes of the governments at the center and states, in promoting inclusive growth, including NREGA, NRHM, SSA and the role of IT in the same.

The following sessions were lively with presentations from senior corporates of KPIT Cummins, Cognizant, Beyondcore, Mckinsey, Zensar, Cisco, Canon, HP, Intel, Educomp, Deloitte, HSBC, Metalogic, Wipro, etc. the audience were appraised of the newer innovations in IT and its benefit to the masses. Mr. Arijit Sengupta, CEO, Beyondcore and Indian Ambassador to IAOP (International Association of Outsourcing Professionals) outlined the important measures taken by IAOP in certifying the aspirant organizations and individuals of outsourcing sector; hence decreasing costs of client organizations, prospective recruiters and also uplifting the employability factor. The themes hovered around India’s opportunities in leveraging its ICT potential, transforming the nation to a knowledge e-economy, etc.

A special session was focused on the improvement of the ICT scenario in the East and North-Eastern states of India. The sessions witnessed engrossing discussions, supported by thought provoking data, and the participative audience asked critical questions; thus leading to serious debates on certain issues; like “if government would incentivize entrepreneurship in underdeveloped areas for the cause of inclusive growth?”, etc. The need of using ICT for agriculture, education and healthcare were discussed in detail. The conclave ended with a lot of learning for the participants and in the concluding remarks, the chairman vowed to organize many similar events in future.

By:
Prof. Debajyoti Majumder
(Globsyn Business School)

Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is a concept that is generally viewed as managing discretionary effort, that is, when employees have choices, they will act in a way that furthers their organization’s interests. An engaged employee is a person who is fully involved in, and enthusiastic about, his or her work. Engaged employees care about the future of the company and are willing to invest the discretionary effort. Engaged employees feel a strong emotional bond to the organization that employs them.

An organization’s productivity is measured not in terms of employee satisfaction but by employee engagement. Employees are said to be engaged when they show a positive attitude toward the organization and express a commitment to remain with the organization.
Organizations that believe in increasing employee engagement levels focus on:

1. Culture: It consists of a foundation of leadership, vision, values, effective communication, a strategic plan, and HR policies that are focused on the employee.
2. Continuous Reinforcement of People-Focused Policies: Continuous reinforcement exists when senior management provides staff with budgets and resources to accomplish their work, and empowers them.
3. Meaningful Metrics: They measure the factors that are essential to the organization’s performance. Because so much of the organization’s performance is dependent on people, such metrics will naturally drive the people-focus of the organization and lead to beneficial change.
4. Organizational Performance: It ultimately leads to high levels of trust, pride, satisfaction, success, and believe it or not, fun.

Contributed By:
Prof. D. P. Chattopadhyay
(Globsyn Business School)

Tips for motivating employees

• Give recognition to your employees
• Treat them with mutual charm, dignity and respect
• Be dispassionate and objective in your actions
• Do not unduly enlarge one employee at the detriment of the other
• Take care of employees' career path
• Applause for major accomplishments
• Inculcate teamspirit
• Implement contests that earn your employees time off
• Observe pizza/popcorn/cookie/rose days
• Spend time evenly with each team member
• Give on-the-spot praise
• Never howl, scream or denigrate any team member in public view

Contibuted By:
Prof. DP Chattopadhyay
(Globsyn Business School)

Management Lessons from 3 - Idiots Movie

1. Never Try To Be Successful Success is the bye-product. Excellence always creates success. So, never run after the success, let it happen automatically in the life.
2. Freedom To Life Don’t die before actual death. Live every moment to the fullest as you are going to die today night. Life is gifted to humankind to live, live & live @ happiness.
3. Passion Leads To Excellence When your hobby becomes your profession and passion becomes your profession. You will be able to lead up to excellence in the life. Satisfaction, pleasure, joy and love will be the outcome of following passion. Following your passion for years, you will surely become something one day.
4. Learning Is Very Simple Teachers do fail. Learners never fail. Learning is never complicated or difficult. Learning is always possible whatever rule you apply.
5. Pressure At Head Current education system is developing pressures on students’ head. University intelligence is useful and making some impact in the life but it cannot be at the cost of the life.
6. Life Is Emotion Management Not Intelligence Optimization Memory and regular study have definite value and it always helps you in leading a life. You are able to survive even if you can make some mark in the path of the life. With artificial intelligence, you can survive and win but you cannot prove yourself genius. Therefore, in this process genius dies in you.
7. Necessity Is The Mother Of Invention Necessity creates pressure and forces you to invent something or to make it happen or to use your potentiality. Aamir Khan in this film, 3 idiots, is able to prove in the film by using aqua guard pump at the last moment.
8. Simplicity is Life Life is need base never want base. Desires have no ends. Simplicity is way of life and Indian culture highly stresses on simple living and high thinking, and this is the way of life: ‘Legs down to earth and eyes looking beyond the sky’ .
9. Industrial Leadership Dean of the institute in 3 idiots is showing very typical leadership. He has his own principles, values and ideology, and he leads the whole institute accordingly. This is an example of current institutional leadership. In the present scenario, most of the institutes are fixed in a block or Squarish thinking.
10. Importance Of One Word In Communication If communication dies, everything dies. Each word has impact and value in communication. One word if used wrongly or emphasized wrongly or paused at a wrong place in communication what effect it creates and how is it affected is demonstrated very well in this movie.
11. Mediocrity Is Penalized Middle class family or average talent or average institute is going to suffer and has to pay maximum price in the life if they do not upgrade their living standards. To be born poor or as an average person is not a crime but to die as an average person with middle class talent is miserable and if you are unable to optimize your potentiality and die with unused potentiality then that is your shameful truth. One should not die as a mediocre. He/she has to bring out genius inside him/her and has to use his/her potentiality to the optimum level.

Contributed By:
Ms. Ipsita Patranabis
(Globsyn Business School)

Pix Source: www.idiotsacademy.zapak.com

Tips for achieving real success in life

• Place Almighty & your family as the first priority.
• Aspire for success.
• Dream big, think big, and think differently.
• Trust in Yourself and your dreams.
• Remove fear and circumspection.
• Be fully committed and determined.
• Do not procrastinate.
• Consider failures as opportunities for learning.
• Be self-motivatedIntrospect, improve and look forward.

Contributed By:
Prof. D. P. Chattopadhyay
(Globsyn Business School)

Seven Steps to Personal Mastery

by Gary Ryan Blair

• Identify Your Three Greatest Accomplishments In 2009: Even if 2009 was a challenging year for you, odds are if you look close enough there's something somewhere to be proud of.
• Analyze What You Learned from Each Accomplishment: Now that you have identified your three greatest accomplishments, go back to each one. This time though identify exactly what you learned or were reminded of by each of them.
• Identify Your Biggest Disappointments of 2009: Practically every company and individual resists analyzing their mistakes. That's a shame because this is where the best learning comes from.
• Analyze What You Learned from Each Failure or Disappointment: No matter how great everything in life is going - we all make mistakes. The trick here is to really analyze them, what preceded them, what could you have done differently, and how can you prevent them in the future.
• Identify How You Limited Yourself and How Can You Stop It: Were there certain actions you took or didn't take that came back to haunt you? In order to make sure you don't limit yourself again - you need to bring these self-defeating actions to the surface, confront them, and most importantly determine what you must do differently to make sure you don't make the same mistakes all over again.
• Pragmatically Review the Information You Have Gathered: The goal of this exercise is not simply to know yourself and your business better but to actually use the information to make certain 2010 far surpasses 2009. What are the big takeaways from answering each question? What do you know about yourself or your business that you didn't realize or weren't thinking about?
  Obviously, having this list isn't going to do it all, you still need to take this new knowledge and USE IT! Fortunately, that's what the last step is centered around. And here it is...
• Use This Information to Astonish Yourself in 2010: The purpose here is to build in to your schedule, your interactions, your management style or whatever else you've surfaced in the previous questions and build yourself a new better approach.

Source: excerpts from: an e-journal,Trans4mind

Effective Performance Appraisal

Performance appraisal is one of the best motivation techniques for creating a positive attitude in the workplace - when it is handled properly.
Here are three tips:

1. Have a genuine interest in the person you are appraising. Get to know what makes them tick. What is their life like outside the workplace? What do they enjoy most? what is important to them?
2. Really listen to what they have to say. It is so easy to make assumptions. Do you take the time to ask your employees for their opinion? Would they come to you if something was bothering them?
3. Stay in a constructive, positive mindset even if they are expressing a lot of negativity and treat them with respect at all times.

Always critique the performance as and when necessary, but do not critique the person.. Remember, it is easy to 'Catch people Wrong"; however, try to 'Catch people right'. Let the workplace be filled with joy and stimulate urge for achievement without hurting anyone unduly.

Contributed By:
Prof. D. P. Chattopadhyay
(Globsyn Business School)